Artificial: A Love Story
by Amy Kurzweil
Buy on AmazonWinner of the Living Now Book Award Finalist for the American Book Fest Best Book Awards A visionary story of three generations of artists whose search for meaning and connection transcends the limits of life How do we relate to—and hold—our family’s past? Is it through technology? Through spirit? Art, poetry, music? Or is it through the resonances we look for in ourselves? In Artificial, we meet the Kurzweils, a family of creators who are preserving their history through unusual means. At the center is renowned inventor and futurist Ray Kurzweil, who has long been saving the documents of his deceased father, Fredric, an accomplished conductor and pianist from Vienna who fled the Nazis in 1938.…
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"In Artificial: A Love Story, New Yorker cartoonist Amy Kurzweil describes how she and her father, famed futurist, technologist and inventor Ray Kurzweil, harness the power of artificial intelligence to connect with the grandfather she never knew. Fred Kurzweil died in 1970. He was a talented conductor and pianist from Vienna who fled the Nazis just before Kristallnacht in 1938 to begin a new life in the United States. Through words and meticulously detailed pen and ink drawings, this smart and spiritual graphic memoir not only chronicles the process that Amy and Ray go through to create a chatbot version of their forebear (“Fred-bot”), but also asks big questions about how we memorialize the people we love and the relationship between technology and humanity."
NPR Books We Love — 2023 · apps.npr.org